The center cannot hold water

Rough transcript of actual conversation
Nameless Garden Stater: "I don't respect people with southern accents, "
Me: "Well, you're talking to two southerners" (me & Steve) "who came from the South to college and dropped their accents on account of that attitude."
NGS: "Oh."
Me: "What do you think of James Carville?"
NGS: "Who?"

Anybody with a non-standard accent -- be it Southern or Brooklyn or Trenton -- is presumed to be provincial and, therefore, limited. Statistically, there may be a basis for this. There is perhaps a broad correlation between staying amongst and conversing with one's own, keeping an accent, and not having access to the breadth of information to the cosmopolitan center. And yet, the center is in its own way xenophobic and reductive. alas.